The BEST day trip to CENOTES from Mérida, Mexico! (TWO cenotes, a hacienda, & MAYAN food)

Today is the day we have been most excited about here in Merida. We are going to Cenotes. The Yucatan Peninsula is home to over 6,000 cenotes which are natural swimming holes that come in all sorts of different shapes, colors, and sizes. There are many cenotes within a short drive from Merida and today we are going on a tour that we booked through Airbnb Experiences to check out two cenotes plus visit an old hacienda and enjoy an authentic Mayan meal prepared by local Mayans. It is going to be such a fun day. My name is Moises or you can call me Moy. Make it smaller. I'll be your friend and guide today. As we made our way to our first cenote, Moy explained to us the three different types of cenotes including completely covered cenotes, semi-open, and open, as well as how the cenotes in this specific area of the Yucatan Peninsula formed. Well, thanks to the media rock they 66 millions of years ago. The one that they believe killed 75 percent of the life extinction on earth including the life of the dinosaurs. So the impact happened in the town these days is called Chipsilu. Chipsilu is about an hour from Merida so they believe with the impact it created holes on the ground. Most people thought that the holes got created by the media rock making the holes from the top but it's not the case. The holes got created with the heat. The best way we can describe it is kind of like when you cook a pancake at home when you flip it around you see the little bubbles. It's the heat looking for the way out. So that's how the cenotes got created. That's why we are the ones that have the bigger number We have driven about an hour outside of the city. We went down on these narrow roads just surrounded by tons of greenery and we have made it to our first cenote which is called I said it so much better than I ever could have. Oh wow it is in here. Oh my gosh. Whoa. Way down there. It's all the way down there. Just look at this. This is insane. The water is so blue. There are fish swimming around. There's stalactites I believe. Oh my gosh. It is just a cave. You would never know it's here. It's just filled with the most stunning water. I can't wait to get in this water. This is awesome. Such a beautiful setting. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Oh yeah this isn't bad at all. This is very comfortable. It's deeper than I thought. This is incredible and we are the only ones here. Mayans believed that the cenotes were a passage to the underworld and as we swam around the cenote we were mind blown by just how deep and dark it got. It truly felt like there was a whole other world underwater. All right we're gonna jump off this platform here into the cenote. Oh gosh. Oh yikes. Oh my gosh. Oh that was awesome. You just gotta go for it. It's tall but it's not that bad. I'm kind of scared of jumping into water. I'm gonna do it. Oh gosh. Oh gosh. Oh gosh. I don't like jumping into water. One, two, three. I'm thrilling. Oh my god. It went all on my neck. That first cenote was just truly magical. Now on to cenote number two. This one's an open cenote, so there's no cover on top. It's just a big open kind of canyon looking area. It looks so cool with all the trees over it and the little vines draping down. You gotta watch your step on this one. Look how steep this is. That's the one we call copo in the Maya language. That's the one the Mayas used to look for to indicate them that they were near water, near the cenotes. Fred. I had enough jumping at the last one, so I'm just gonna walk on into this one. Our favorite thing about this second cenote is that since it was fully open, when the sun hit the water, it turned the water bright blue and created some insane light beams underwater, which was absolutely magical. There's a platform up here that is 11 meters tall, which is over 30 feet, and a local kid is about to jump off of it. Oh my god. Wow. Yeah, you couldn't pay me to jump from up there. I can't even convince myself to jump from this little platform. I've changed my mind. We are gonna jump off the smaller platform together. I chickened out on that one, but I will do it this time. All right, three, two, one, go. I was nudity. I'm proud of myself because jumping into water is out of my comfort zone. My heart is still beating so fast, but we did it. We did it. It might have taken me two tries, but we did it. After two hours of swimming in the beautiful cenotes, it's time for lunch at a local's house, which I think we're almost as equally as excited about. Our meal started off with some refreshing hibiscus water, rice and beans, the tortillas we just watched being made, and a new item for us, siquilpac. It's made of ground pumpkin seeds, like into a flour. Oh yeah, that's awesome. And of course, some sopa de lima, which we shared in our last video, but this one was the best we've had yet. The lime flavor is just so strong in this one. You can really taste the difference between a regular lime and the lime they use for this soup. Oh wow. You have what we call panucho. The panucho is the one that has with chicken. It has beans in the middle. You have what we call chayita, because it's the one that has what we call or what we consider to be the mayo spinach. Chaya is a leaf that we use a lot in the different dishes. And you have a taco of pochuk. Ah, okay. The pochuk, they marinate the meat with sour orange. That sauce on top, so good. It's like crispy, but so soft on the inside. The cheese makes it so good too. The food was all so delicious, and the tour itself was about 70 USD per person, but this meal was an additional 200 pesos per person, which is around 11 USD. And the reason they do this is so that all the money goes directly to the family. Our guide Moy was saying that without having these tours come every day, they'd have to go all the way into Merida to find work. Another thing we did not mention is that the cenotes we visited today were all managed by local families as well. They take turns managing them, so it's been really cool to get to experience some really local off-the-beaten-path places and support the communities around here. All right, now for our final stop, a hacienda. At one time we used to have about 1,600 of these haciendas, around 1,600, around the state of, around the peninsula of Yucatan. Out of the 1,600 these days, it's only like 400 of them left. Out of those 400, some of them have been completely restorated. Those are the ones that people from other countries or from other states, they rent to celebrate the weddings, anniversaries, quinceañeras, things like that. So unfortunately, these places, they hold a lot of sad memories because slavery was here. Actually, these places, they got very rich with a plant that I mentioned to you before that is called anikin. The anikin is a plant, it's from the agave family. There's 200 types of agaves in the world, like some of them are good for tequila and mezcal. Only three of them were good to get the fiber out of it, and anikin is one of them. So these places, at one time, they used to have big plantations. We're talking about 30, 40, 50 acres of plantation. The reason they need a big plantation was because for them to get the first production of the plant, they have to wait seven years. And then out of that seven years, they can take a section yearly. And then out of each leaf or out of each penca that we call, they only get 10 percent out of it. So that's why they need a massive production for them to get some out of it. That's why when the plastic came on in 1935, there was no way for them to compete with it because the plastic was much, much faster. So the building you see in front of us, that's where the factory used to be. If you notice, there's the chimney. Remember back then, there was no power electricity. So the machines used to run on steam power. That's why around the haciendas, around these places, you don't see very tall or very old trees because at one time, they used to cut them up for maintaining the fire of the chimney. But over here, we don't know them as chimneys. We call them chacuacos. We then explored the inside of the haciendas living quarters, and unlike some of the haciendas that have been restored in the Yucatan, this one is currently in limbo as the owner passed away nine years ago and didn't have a will. So his sister and nephew are fighting to keep it in the family. The cenotes were a ton of fun, but this is really cool. This hacienda is so old. There's so many old details and old wood. So many things to look at on here and all the history that happened here. It's really interesting and fascinating to see. We've been given some time to just freely walk around, and I feel like I'm in a jungle that has just grown inside of these old buildings. They're in the process of trying to figure out what the future of this place looks like, but I love it as it is now. It just has so much character. Just so old. Thank you, you're the best. That tour was so much fun. A huge shout out to our guide, Moi. He was just super informative and just made the experience even better. And that was just kind of the perfect tour for what we're interested in. It had beautiful nature, culture, history, and food. It just combined everything we love into one tour, and it just felt so authentic. And one of the things I loved even was just driving around and seeing all the small towns along the way. It was just really neat to escape the city for a bit and just kind of see smaller town living, and it was just so beautiful. We'll link to the tour in the description below if you want to check it out for yourself. But for our next adventure, we're going to be heading out on another day trip to check out some Mayan ruins, but this time we're going to go out there all on our own. No guide, so hopefully it goes smoothly. Morning. Good morning. Buenos dias. Hi, buddy. Hi. Oh, you're super cute. There's a cenote in the parking lot. Seriously? Really. Well, now I'm more mad we didn't bring our Costco membership with us. Dang it. Well, the good thing, you can still see it because it's in the parking lot, so you don't have to go inside the store. All right, we're going to Moscow later. See the cenote. And you, there's one less. On your list.